Xu Dishan许地山

Style & Daoist names

pen name Luo Huasheng, courtesy name Dishan

Period

Republican Era

Dates

1893 — 1941

Role

WriterScholar of Religion

Birthplace

Tainan (ancestral home in Jieyang, Guangdong)

Life

Xu Dishan, whose pen name was Luo Huasheng, was a native of Tainan, Taiwan, a modern writer and scholar of religion who studied in the United States at Columbia University and in England at the University of Oxford, researching the history of religion and Sanskrit, and served successively as a professor at Yenching University and the University of Hong Kong. His History of Daoism (Daojiao shi, first volume, 1934) is among the earliest works on the history of Daoism written by a Chinese scholar using modern academic methods, mainly discussing the origins of the Daoist philosophical schools and techniques (fangshu) before the rise of organized Daoism, while drawing on Western theories of religious studies. He also wrote A Study of the Superstition of Spirit-Writing (Fuji mixin di yanjiu), examining the phenomenon of spirit-writing (fuji) from a sociological perspective. He died of illness in Hong Kong in 1941. Xu Dishan advocated studying Daoism as an independent religion in its own right, and his work was an inspiration for the later studies of Daoist history and texts by Fu Qinjia, Chen Guofu and others.

Contributions & Influence

• Wrote the first volume of History of Daoism, a pioneering work of modern Chinese scholarship on Daoist history
• Studied phenomena such as spirit-writing in folk Daoism using the methods of religious studies
• Situated Daoism within the comparative perspective of modern religious studies

Works

• History of Daoism (Volume One)
• Fuji mixin di yanjiu (扶箕迷信底研究, A Study of the Superstition of Spirit-Writing)